Author(s): Lisa Warker + Kate Rhodes (Editor)

Art

Edited by Kate Rhodes and Nella Themelios, this expanded second edition of An unreliable guidebook to jewellery by Lisa Walker further explores how the work of the internationally celebrated New Zealand jeweller can be framed by the career-long provocation ‘What is jewellery?’. Originally published to accompany the retrospective exhibition Lisa Walker: She wants to go to her bedroom but she can’t be bothered at RMIT Design Hub Gallery, Melbourne, in early 2019, the release of the book’s extended new edition – co-published by RMIT Design Hub Gallery and Perimeter Editions – coincides with the final iteration of the exhibition at Te Uru Waitākere Contemporary Gallery in Auckland in June 2021. 
Foregrounding the act of asking questions and the pleasure and importance of the ‘as yet understood’, the book includes a proliferation of new works, texts, materials and documentation from the touring exhibition’s recent installations at CODA Museum (Apeldoorn, The Netherlands, 2019) and Villa Stuck (Munich, Germany, 2020). At once systematic and malleable in their structure, the narratives that emerge within this volume offer an open-ended reflection on Walker’s practice and output, moving across different time periods, veering off on tangents, but returning to the many concerns of the field in which she has so firmly embedded herself. Graphic Design by Ziga Testen and Kim Mumm Hansen. Widely regarded as one of New Zealand’s most influential contemporary jewellers, Lisa Walker (b, 1967) has received countless New Zealand and international awards, and her work has been acquired for major public and private collections both in New Zealand and internationally. Using a vast range of materials and construction methods, she creates objects that pulse with an unlikely conflux of cultural, historical and material references, mining jewellery’s history and present to explore the medium’s peripheries and potential futures. Walker’s most prominent international recognition was receiving the 2009 Dutch Francoise van den Bosch Award, considered the premier jewellery award in the world. In a career spanning three decades, she has held more than seventy solo exhibitions throughout New Zealand, Australia, Europe, the United Kingdom and the United States.